Trailers

Click on the full screen button in the bottom right and buckle up because it truly is a wild ride. I hope you enjoy.

The trailers are basically a drive to and through Scranton at high speed. My wife, Elisha, and I shot the original footage last October. I drove the car while she operated the camera. It’s an hour of footage reduced to three minutes, thanks to video editing. Several places mentioned in Welcome to Scranton are shown. Unfortunately, the shot of the Welcome sign on the Scranton Expressway turned out blurry. We forgot the video camera on subsequent trips to Scranton and eventually the trailer project fell of the radar. We went back recently for the sole purpose of filming a good shot of the Welcome sign. It took two passes and we actually stopped the car alongside the sign to make sure we got it.

The video was done but I still didn’t have the right song to go with it. I host a jazz show on the radio so I wanted to use a jazz song. No jazz I tried worked well with the speed of the video. Anything in jazz that does move fast enough to keep up with the video is too hardcore for a non-jazz fan to enjoy.

As I was driving home from Scranton on a Saturday night after visiting family, I tuned into Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion on the radio. Garrison introduced Paul Johnson and Gil Orr of The Duo-tones. They played an incredibly fast surf guitar tune from the 1960s. It’s an amazing song that gets you moving. They followed it up with “Mr. Moto,” another great song, which Paul Johnson wrote himself as a teenager. As soon as the Duo-tones stopped playing, I wanted to hear the songs again. When I got home, I immediately fired up the computer, went to the band’s website, and purchased “Pipeline” and “Mr. Moto.” I’ve listened to them over and over since that night.

Pipeline fit perfectly with the video and the Welcome to Scranton‘s tagline of “It’s a wild ride.” Still, the video was twice as long as the song. I cut it up into two videos. The second trailer is to the song "Surf Rider" by the Lively Ones.